Recounted by the biographer of Miles Davis and Sun Ra, and featuring a cast of characters that includes Eleanor Roosevelt, Leadbelly, Carl Sandburg, Carl Sagan, Jelly Roll Morton, Muddy Waters, and Bob Dylan, this is the remarkable story of a man who tirelessly sought out, catalogued, and popularized American folk music. Alan Lomax began his career making field recordings of rural music with his father John Lomax for the Library of Congress, and by the late 1930s he brought his discoveries to radio, performed by Woody Guthrie, Pete Seeger, and Burl Ives. But this was merely the first step in an unparalleled career in 20th-century American media and culture, a panorama that John Szwed lets us see through Lomax's life.

"The scope of Alan Lomax's protean and profoundly influential life's work grants him the designations folklorist, musicologist, oral historian, photographer, filmmaker, recording and concert producer, anthropologist, archivist, activist, and author. But even this litany barely covers Lomax's pioneering documentation of music born of pain and injustice, his crossing racial lines in the segregated South to collect African American songs, and his bringing folk music into the mainstream.... Here are the full stories of Lomax's pivotal relationships with Zora Neale Hurston, Lead Belly, Jelly Roll Morton, Pete Seeger, and Margaret Mead. Factually tireless and fluently analytical, Szwed gamely corrals a great river of events, efforts, and discoveries into a straight-ahead portrait of an intrepid, culture-defining artist and humanist ... driven by a voracious hunger for life and unshakable faith in art."—Booklist (starred review)